A particularly common situation in stable democracies with highly developed state apparatuses at the national and sub-national levels is that a number of electoral costs are shared among the electoral administration and other public agencies. This is the case with the making and updating of voter lists and district boundary delimitation, voter information, the conduct of external and proxy voting, early transmission of results, dispute adjudication, and security of the polling operation. Sometimes such costs are easily identifiable within an electoral budget of the national EMB or of another public agency. Frequently, however, there are diffuse costs within the state and local administrations that cannot be sorted out as electoral costs since they are part of standard costs of functioning state apparatuses (i.e., local governments, police) or of private organizations (i.e., private schools functioning as polling centers at no cost). Such costs cannot be properly assessed unless program-focused cost accounting is made by the implementing agency, which is not usually the case in most governmental agencies dealing with a variety of activities (e.g., local governments, census and statistical authorities or civil registries). A typical agency budget is normally structured by separating personnel and non-personnel services (materials and procurements), but it generally difficult to determine how much of each is devoted to a given election-related activity (i.e. security, arranging for polling stations, supplying information for voter lists) as part of the larger cost of operations of the entire organization.
For example, in Spain and Sweden, voter lists are compiled in a national office of statistics. Although the electoral authorities pay a fee for the lists, this does not cover the full cost of the operation simply because there are hidden costs that could only be ascertained by program-focused cost accounting. There are other hidden costs in both countries, as in many others, related to the conduct of the polling operation by provincial and local municipal administrations, the postal services, police and embassies abroad.
Such a wide range of hidden costs is less likely in countries with small state infrastructures, where almost any electoral cost incurred at any level of government can be easily spotted and referred to a general electoral budget for provision or refund by whatever authority implemented a given election-related activity. For example, in Cambodia and Guatemala, a local employee at the municipal level is exclusively in charge of helping with civil registry and voter lists. Although the municipality provides certain office support, both the main office and salary costs are covered in the national electoral budget. A number of templates of electoral budgets are included as illustrative examples of budget structures in different democracy environments.
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